The Chambers

At Disney World there are four different theme parks. Each have a different theme and unique attractions and shows. Today we visited EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow, or something like that). The park has two parts, the first has quite a few rides and is like a traditional theme park, whilst the second part is like a World Expo. Today we only did the first part, tomorrow we’re going back to do the World Expo part.

My take from EPCOT is that it is supposed to include some representation of what communities in the future will be like. If that’s the case, get ready for bunches of merchandise places, weird costumed characters and “scooter hogs” (more on that in a future post) to be everywhere.

At EPCOT there is a show called “Turtle Talk with Crush”. In this show the kids sit down the front of a small theatre on the floor and the parents / adults sit up the back. The show is pretty clever in that the kids are able to interact in real time with Crush the Turtle from the Nemo movie, who appears on a movie screen. As questions are asked the turtle responds to the specific questions and also makes comments about people in the crowd, like what shirt someone is wearing.

Jackson was sitting down the front with all the other kids and I thought I’d start video’ing Crush, because it’s just pretty nifty that they can do this. And then, Jackson asked a question….

Pretty funny stuff, hard to script this type of stuff I’d reckon!

Disney do a great job of theming up their parks. The attention to detail is marvellous and I guess that’s how they make their money, by putting people in a different place and making them think – even if only for a second – that they have been moved to another time or place.

Now, I wasnt around in the 1950’s, but last night we got a taste of it! We had dinner at a place called the Prime Time Cafe in one of the Disney parks. It’s themed like a 1950’s home! Even better your waiter is in character as a Mom from the 1950’s and she goes around the restaurant telling everyone to get their elbows off the table! Some of her other favourite lines were “No whinging and no complaining” (Jacko didnt like that one) and she even rolled out the “If you don’t eat your greens, no pudding!” (see photo of Kylie, muhahahahaha!)

The desert menu is on ViewMasters and the food is all very “homely”. Kylie had meatloaf and I had steak and vegetables, with the steak cooked medium / well and it came out cooked very well!

Jackson and I both got a “Clean Plate Award” sticker from “Mom” for eating all our dinner, while Kylie left beans behind, so got no sticker.

I havent quite worked out how to embed pictures from flickr into a post here, so click this
link for photos.

cc, Kylie and Jacko

We all had a great time at Disney World! The resort was great and the parks were a lot fun. We think daily updates might get a bit boring, so we’re going to do a few different posts on some of the things we’ve enjoyed about our holiday here at Walt Disney World.

Theme Parks

Magic Kingdom

We spent most of our time at this park. I have lots to write about, but will come back to do this bit of our holiday later, as well as a couple of special things we did here, which need pictures to accompany the update.

Epcot

Epcot’s an interesting park, with a real mix of attractions. The park is basically split into two parts, with one part being focused on the future and the other part being “World Showcase”, which is like a World Expo.

Some of the ride highlights of Epcot were;

Soarin’ – this is a great ride and we ended up doing it twice. It’s very hard to describe…. You fly over iconic American locations as though you are on a hand glider, the scenes you look at include snow fields, cities, ocean, flying behind jet fighters and a NAVY chopper and more. During the ride different scents, which correlate to the scenery you are enjoying, are pumped into the ride – including a pine scent for the snow scenes and orange for when you fly over a citrus farm. Thankfully, no off prawns for the ocean scenes!

Nemo and Friends was ok, a bit of talk about the Great Barrier Reef. Turtle Talk with Crush (a turtle from the Nemo movie) was great – all the kids sat down the front of the cinema and Crush appeared on a screen and interacted in real time with the audience – even fielding questions from the kids! Test Track is a General Motors sponsored ride which puts you in a GM vehicle and you then move through a series of tests which they put their new model cars through, including breaking tests, tests on the suspension (very bumpy spots), heat / cold / corrosion tests and others – the climax of the ride is you go on a speed test, where you reach speeds up to 70 miles per hour (about 100 km h) and corner at high speed – great fun!!

We had lunch at a Teppanyaki restaurant – communal seating, which Jackson enjoyed, because he ended up being the centre of attention. Jackson got his meal served in a plate shaped like the bullet train. We then had dinner at Le Cellier, which is a Canadian steak house. Our appetizer (entrée) was a cheddar cheese soup – outstanding!!

We even got to enjoy a few (not quite quiet) cold beverages towards the end of the day in “France” – champa’s for big K and a nice red for me.

Disney MGM Studios

As with the Magic Kingdom, we had a great time here and did a couple of special things, I would like to come back and do this update once we have some pictures to put online.

Animal Kingdom

We spent ¾ of a day here and enjoyed the park immensely. The highlights were the Kilimanjaro Safari’s, during which you sit in a truck and do a tour through a few different “African” eco-systems and see animals – a unique type of zoo basically. Kylie particularly enjoyed this as we got VERY close to a giraffe – she could have reached out of the truck to touch it and we also saw Hippo’s, Gorilla’s, Rhino’s, Warthogs and a bunch more of animals through the rest of the park including a great fish tank (like the Polar Bear set up at SeaWorld) which you could the above and underneath the waterline and a waterfall which some ducks were using as a waterslide! A funny story from the Safari ride was that as we come into the giraffe “zone” there were 4 or 5 giraffes in total, with a couple on each side of the road and they were eating from the trees. It turns out that the trees have feed dishes in them and they are loaded up with food to get the giraffes to be on either side of the trucks. That’s the extent to which things are done here to make sure everyone has as great an experience as possible.

We saw a brilliant show, based on the Lion King, which featured great costumes, singing, dancing and aerobatics. (see an earlier post for more info on this) Jackson was telling us he didn’t want to see this show, but he loved it (except for the fire twirler)!

We also rode a few rides and met some Disney characters.

Downtown Disney

Downtown Disney isn’t a theme park per se, it’s more of an entertainment precinct (read another place to get the hard earned out of your wallet and into the pockets of Disney shareholders).

There were some great stores here. The favourites of the Chambers clan were (in no particular order);

The Lego Shop had a few large lego constructed statues outside the store, including a dragon / loch ness monster in the (real) lake, a 2 mtr tall dinosaur (with a real life squirrel clambering all over it’s back) and some sharks and other animals. We also enjoyed walking through the world’s largest Disney store (50,000 square feet of stuff), a store chockers with Christmas goods and chattels (such as Christmas tree ornaments, wreaths, etc), a store full of scrap booking things (Nicole, you would have loved it) and an ESPN store. We had lunch at the Rainforest Café, which Jackson enjoyed. This restaurant had a jungle theme to it and included many mechanical gorilla’s and elephants. One of the gorillas was perched right above our table and every 10 minutes or so the gorilla would come to life and start waving his arms and grunting – Jackson must have thought it was pretty realistic, because each time the gorilla started, he would move his drink a bit closer to himself because he thought the gorilla was going to drink it. Of course, I would then move it back closer to the gorilla so that the next time it started up, Jackson would think that the gorilla was going to take his drink again.

Polynesian Resort

The resort has been great. It’s got great amenities, including a couple of good restaurants, access to all modes of Disney transport, the staff here have been very friendly and helpful and we’ve had nice views of the lagoon and the Magic Kingdom fireworks.

Rides at the parks

Goofy’s barnstormer was Jackson’s first roller coaster, we rode it once at day (with Chris) and another time at night (with Kylie). It’s a coaster built just for kids with a couple of tight turns, but no corkscrew loop-di-loops or such.

Buzz Lightyear. We ended up riding this 4 or 5 times. Jackson says the best bit about this ride was shooting zurg!

Tower of Terror was fantastic, I explained a fair bit of this one earlier. Who knew bouncing like a yo-yo in a haunted lift shaft would be so much fun?

Kilimanjaro safaris was great for all of us and a tour of African

Turtle talk with Crush was good fun.

Soarin’ was excellent! Loved it!

Up and down rides. These were definitely amongst Jackson’s favourite rides, up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down…. Dumbo and Aladdin and Dino.

Dining

The food here has been pretty good. We’ve enjoyed a cooked breakfast most mornings and Jackson has had Fruit Loops or something like that (what are holidays for!!).

There are some restaurants here which are incredibly popular and we wanted to make sure we got to eat at them. For those restaurants you can (and in some cases have to) book up to 180 days in advance – yes 180 days in advance, to be assured of getting a table… thankfully we didn’t book any restaurants and then not feel like that type of food on the day.

Jackson enjoyed Pizzafari at the Animal Kingdom. Cheese Pizza has been a regular meal for Jackson here and we now joke with him about him turning into a piece of cheese pizza.

Our (Chris and Kylie’s) favourites have been “Le Cellier” – which was the Canadian Steakhouse and dinner at “Chef Mickeys”, which was more traditional US food of cornbread and the like and had characters come around to the table to say hi and pose for photos.

The character dining restaurants have been great – they’re mainly buffet restaurants and the characters move around and go to each table and get their photos taken with people (the kids mainly) at the tables.

We’ve also had our share of burgers and chips, pizza, doughnuts and ice creams and waffles shaped like Mickey Mouse….

Characters

The benefit of writing the blog updates is that I am the writer and editor… it’s hard for Kylie to edit my posts and I can say things like “I am not sure who enjoyed the character meetings more, Kylie or Jackson”. Character meetings are exactly that – you line up to meet characters from Disney shows / movies and get your photo taken with them and get their autograph.

I won’t list out all of the characters Jackson (and Kylie) met, but it was a LOT! It might be easier to list off those they did not meet.

The ham…. When Jackson gets to the front of the character greeting line, he hands the photopass over to the photographer and then runs in and gives the character a big hug and turns around, strikes a pose and smiles for the photo. He then shakes the characters hand (or gives them five) and then runs back to Kylie.

Sheesh….

All in all, we’ve had a great time here at Disney. We’ve got a whole bunch of photos (hundreds and hundreds) which we will post here to the bog when we get time.

This update comes to you from the future. I’m talking about day 2 of our holiday at Disney, but we’re really on about day six.

This scene is titled “The Ham in action”.

I think the sign of a true holiday is when you forget what day of the week it is – that happened a while ago, but since being at Disney, despite everything we’ve managed to do, we have really had a great time and enjoyed watching Jackson having a great time (sure, sure – Kylie and I have enjoyed “Disney” too). I’ve never been a massive fan of theme parks, but Disney does holidays so well and I am sure Disney would say that they aren’t just theme parks, they’re experiences, or where dreams come true – or something like that. I don’t ever recall thinking badly of the service from any of their “cast members: (that’s what all staff are called here), the services which are offered are done so with convenience (through clever use of technology and processes) and everything is clean and tidy.

There are people who come here every year. I’m not sure that would be for me, but if I lived in the states, I could definitely see myself coming here every 3 or 4 years or so. There are shows and rides which Jackson simply could not sit through, but we’ve (Kylie and Chris) still only not done a couple of rides and we’ve been sure to do any rides we really wanted to do.

On with the show….

Friday 9th November

We had a wake up call ordered for 620am or so…. Micket Mouse was our wake up call (or at least a recording of Mickey Mouse). This made is a bit easier to get Jackson awake, as we put the call out through speaker & that woke him up quick smart.

We followed yesterday’s trip to the Magic Kingdom up with a visit to Disney’s MGM Studios. This park has a movie cinema theme to it and features many attractions we knew Jackson would love and quite a few of his favourite “cartoon” characters live here, it also had a few things I knew Kylie and I would enjoy.

The bus ride from our resort to the MGM was 20 minutes or so. Kylie’s mum takes Jackson on bus rides all the time, so he is well trained on buses and he enjoyed looking out the window at all the new sights.

Some of the highlights of MGM;

The Little Mermaid show is a 15 minute puppetry show which has some very cool special effects. Jackson did not want to do this – he told us in no uncertain terms that he did not want to do it – but afterwards he said he loved the show, even though there was a few scary bits. The show is live and the puppetry in the show is fantastic, with some of the puppets a couple of meters high! At one point in the show light sprays of water rained down on us – Jackson had a gobsmacked moment right here…

The Playhouse Disney show was right across the road from the Little Mermaid show. This was another live character show, with many of Jackson’s favourite TV stars on hand. For the parents (& grandparents forced to endure these shows) in our audience, we saw Bear & the Big Blue House and his friends, Stanley & his goldfish buddy, Jo Jo and Goliath and Winnie the Pooh and friends (and some other guy I’ve never seen before – thankfully, he was annoying!!). Jackson was up and dancing and clapping along and having a great time. (Meema, we video recorded the “goodbye song” for you).

Today was not the first time we have seen the ham in action, but it’s the most prolific appearance of the ham. A ham is apparently a US phrase for someone who knows how to strike a pose for a photo. We have a first class ham in our family, and it is no Kylie or Chris. The ham was out in force today, as Jackson struck a pose for photos with MANY of his favourite characters. I think this list is comprehensive – but I may have missed some & excuse the spelling if I havent got it right. Leo from Little Einstein’s, Jo Jo and Goliath from Jo Jo’s circus, Sully from Monsters Inc (this was for Kylie I am convinced), Buzz, Woody and Combat Carl from Toy Story & Lightning McQueen (!!! – more on that later). At one point I am sure I saw “Blue Steel” (the “Zoolander” fans will get it).

I (Chris) got to do a couple of rides today. Another great aspect to visiting a Disney park is called “Fast Pass”. “Fast Pass” allows you to go to a ride and run your park admission ticket through a special machine which then gives you a ticket to come back to that ride within an alloted time later in the day and jump the queue! It’s awesome, I have walked past hundreds of people waiting in line to ride some rides using a fast pass, which is available to anyone in the parks – I do not know why more people don’t use it.

The Rock n Rollercoaster has an Aerosmith (the band) theme to it. By having picked up a fastpass to this earlier in the day I was able to walk past a few hundred people right to near the front of the line! The rollercoaster is completely in doors and in mostly the dark, it is very smooth, with little to no jerkiness to the ride.

The other thrill ride I took today was the “Twighlight Zone’s Tower of Terror”. It is a little like th Dream World ride in that it features a drop from a great height. The theme of the ride is a twighlight zone story about a LA hotel frequented by Hollywood stars during the 1950’s, the hotel got struck by lightning and some people in one of the lifts at the time were killed and their ghosts were doomed to haunt the hotel for ever (i think that’s it anyway). Fastpass again – so as I walked past all the people in the other line, I felt a bit like Wayne or Garth from Wayne’s World when they had backstage ticket’s to the Alice Cooper concert and they were walking around flaunting their backstage tix in front of all and sundry! For the ride itself you board the lift which then goes on a little ride to the “drop zone”, you arrive at the “drop zone” which is is a completely darkened area – so you dont know you’re at the drop zone…. then you drop 13 floors like a “yo-yo” – up and down and up and down! the drop is apparently randomised so you never have the same drop twice. this is very cool ride!

Jackson, Kylie and I all did the Star Wars ride. This is a bit like the Batman ride at Movie World, you sit in a simulator and fly to the moon endor. Good fun and Jackson did well to not get too scared on this one considering all the jolting around, loud noise and that it was a bit frightening (for a 3 year old) in parts. After the ride I got myself a new stormtrooper t-shirt!

Jackson met Lightning McQueen, from the Cars movie, today. This character greeting is very popular, we were in line half an hour before the time Lightning was going to get there and even then we still were about the sixth group in line! We’ve got a couple of cracking photo’s of this and we all loved Jackson meeting Lightning.

They have a daily parade at 3pm which is of characters and their cars, which was ok. After this we went back to the hotel by bus and then onto a boat and over to the Magic Kingdom for some night-time fun.

Tonight we spent most of our time in “Tomorrowland”, which is future themed.

One of the first rides we did was the “Tomorrowland Transit Authority”, which is a little tram style ride which is elevated up at around second / third floor level and goes through some buildings and rides and gives you a decent perspective of what is in that section of the park. Tonight we got a perspective on some of the parts we probably shouldnt get too much of a perspective on, as the rie broke down while we were on it and in a tunnel. Jackson is still a bit iffy about the dark and tunnels, so this wasnt the best place for us to break down!! We were there for between 20 minutes and half an hour, with a near continuous message being played telling us the ride had stopped momentarily, to stay seated and not to leave our cars and that the ride might begin at any moment. Jackson handled the darkness well and eventually they walked us off the ride, for the inconvenience they gave us a few fast pass like tickets.

We had our first ride on the Buzz Lightyear ride….. the first of many goes on this ride. Jackson loves it – you sit in a carriage, with a ray gun and shoot buzz’s enemy zurg. We rode the mad hatters tea cup ride tonight.

We were back at the room at about 930 and asleep by about 931.

Hi everyone! Disney hasn’t had the free wireless which we had in New York, so the updates haven’t been as frequent from here. Besides that, if we thought New York was very busy, Disney World has not provided much let up!

We are having an absolute blast here at Disney – the weather has been very kind to us, with maximums around 26 or so and the evenings the temp drops down to about 10 – 13′ish. Much more civilised than New York.

We’ve been jotting down our daily happenings in an offline note – but getting time to post the updates here has been a challenge – we’re knackered at the end of the days… I’ll try to catch up on the postings… I promise!

We have STACKS of photos. Up to this point in the trip we hadn’t been able to get photos off one of the cameras, so we’d just been deleting the bad ones as we go. I was able to work out why it was doing that and get all the folders into one place and we have taken 661 photos / videos while we’ve been away. That’s a lot of photos for us; we are not noted photo takers. After looking through them, I can report we have elected for quantity over quality…. We take average photos! This number doesn’t include those taken on our tour of New York, or those taken by Disney photographers…. Man – that slideshow night is going to be amazing! Who wants an invite??

Happy Birthday to my sister Nicole, who turned 21 again on the 11th of November. Hope you had a great day Nicole!

Thursday 8^th November

Today we left New York. We left Manhattan at about 7am, we used the same car service we’d booked for our arrival into New York and the same driver we had on arrival was waiting outside, catching a few z’s while he waited for us.

We had to pay excess luggage charges leaving New York!! Our bags are already over the limit, with still more than half our trip in front of us. We are able to have up to two bags each – but I was hoping to limit the number of checked luggage bags to 3 large bags… not that I am carrying the bags very many places – just that we don’t want to have to hire a semi trailer to get us from the airports to our hotels…. Damn shoe shopping. Admittedly, we haven’t packed everything properly yet, so we can still fit more in, but we’ll just buy another bag somewhere and spread the load out a bit more.

We flew Jet Blue from New York City to Orlando. They were outstanding! I highly recommend them, the leg room was amazing, they had the TV’s in the seat backs just like Virgin Blue do (but it was free) and the service from the hosties was good. They pride themselves on providing the most leg room in coach service, and I thank them for that.

We arrived in Orlando right on schedule. Disney has a great service, called “Magical Express”. They provide you with luggage tags for your bags and you put them on your bags before you check in at your departing airport. Then when you arrive in Orlando, they get your bags and transfer them to your room. This means, I (we) didn’t have to worry about seeking out those fat lime green bags we’ve got and hauling them through the airport and to the hotel. I thank Disney for that.

Caught the Disney bus from the airport to the hotel and arrived at about 2pm and though check-in was not until 3pm, our room was ready! We are staying at the Polynesian Resort (the resort is disney style – south pacific themed) and we have a fantastic room, right on the Disney built “Seven Seas Lagoon”, with a view towards one of Disney’s Parks – the Magical Kingdom. We can see the Disney Castle and have a nice view of the nightly fireworks.

A quick freshen up and we headed off to the Magic Kingdom. I guess this is the park most people think of when they thing of Disney. This park it has the big castle (cinderella’s??) and the spinning Teacup and Dumbo rides.

From the resort we are staying at you can get to the Magic Kingdom by bus, monorail or boat. The transportation from the resorts to the parks is very efficient and comfortable and is another great aspect of a Disney holiday. The boat is the quickest between our resort and the Magic Kingdom and the one we ended up catching the most often to that park.

A great use of technology by Disney is their “keys to the kingdom”. This is our room key, but they also allow you to use that to charge back almost anything to your room from anywhere on property (including the theme parks), it is also our entry tickets to the parks we’re visiting and we pre-purchased a dining plan so we give this key to the server at the restaurants instead of handing over cash / credit card to pay for meals. When you enter your first park, they scan your finger and store that away somewhere or rather and then each time you enter a park you need to scan the same finger again to get into the park (which caught me out, because one of the days we went to a park, I couldn’t remember which finger I had scanned the first day) . I am sure civil libertarians somewhere or rather would take umbrage to that, but I bet it helps Disney cut down on fraudulent entry to the parks.

Jackson was VERY excited to be at Disney! He was skipping and jumping and singing and wanted to do everything THAT second. Within the Magic Kingdom there is a lot for us to do, this park and Disney’s MGM Studios are the ones we thought we would enjoy the most.

Inside the Magic Kingdom, they have a great LPG powered “steam” railroad which does a full loop of the park. The first thing we did was ride the railroad a full loop so we could see what the park was like. This park is divided into different “world’s” or themed areas, so the railroad was great for getting a look at the different areas of the park and seeing what was there to do.

After the train we walked up the main boulevard and towards the castle. Another great Disney use of technology is called the “photopass”. Disney has photographers all over the theme parks, mostly in spots where great photos can be taken. These photographers will take your photo and then scan your photopass – which is a credit card sized card with a unique code, so all your photos can be stored in one place for purchase at the end of your stay. You get them on a CD and they add some special effects (like Disney characters) in to some of the photos. We pre-purchased this and got a great discount on the cost – no matter how many photo’s you get taken the cost is the same. So, we’ve got more photos taken by someone else, so there should be SOME good quality photos amongst that lot.

We got our photo taken in front of the castle and kept walking around towards “Frontierland”.

We stopped at the castle because there was a crowd and we assumed something was going to be happening soon and sure enough about 10 minutes later Mickey, Minnie, Donald Duck, Goofy and some of their other friends came out and did a show. I have a great photo of Jackson’s face during this show. In the photo he is basically gobsmacked; his eye’s have a trance like look to them, his jaw has dropped a little and he just can’t believe what is on stage before him. After so much planning and travelling, it made Kylie and I very happy to see that look. We’ve since seen that look quite a few times!

After the show we kept on walking and came to a ride called Aladdin’s Magic Carpets. This is a kids ride, which Kylie took Jackson on, basically you sit in a carriage designed to look like a magic carpet and you are able to make the “carpet” fly up and down by moving a lever in the carriage. There are a few of this style of ride here in Disney and it has since been (imaginatively) labelled by Jackson as the “Up and down ride. You go up and down and up and down and up and down.” It has accompanying hand signals, I am sure you get the drift. Jackson loved his first ride at Disney and came off the ride balling, because he did not want to get off he wanted to stay on!

We had dinner at “Peco Bills”, which served up “fine” Mexican fare. Disney uses technology very well. In some restaurants there are touch screen kiosks you can use to order your whole meal, you then take the receipt the kiosk prints out for you to the counter and pick up your meal. Very clever! (I have photos….)

After dinner we went back to the up and down and up and down and up and down ride, so that I could have a turn with Jackson. The line was much longer, but still moved pretty quickly.

After dinner we went to find a spot to sit down and watch the night-time parade. The parade is called “SpectroMagic” and they turn off most of the lighting along the parade path and the parade consists of floats light up by tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of bulbs. Jackson made friends with another family and managed to squeeze his way to a front row seat sitting on the curb. This parade is amazing – it happens twice nightly (at the moment) and nightly throughout the rest of the year and the floats are like the floats we use to see in Warana. We all enjoyed the parade a lot.

After the parade we jumped on the boat back to the resort and went to our room to watch the fireworks, which started at 900pm. There is also a nightly electric water pageant, which is “floats on boats”, this went straight by our window… nice room!

Best night sleep since LA!

That was our first day at Disney – we’ve since had 3 more full-on days like it and we’re having a great time.

I’ll try and get some photo’s up into the slide show

Bye for now

cc, kc and jackson